Immunity: Anniversary of your death
by Bamboofoxfire Productions
Summary: He had no such excuses to explain why he couldn't have saved La-… his friend, if only he'd tried a little harder; acted a little faster; been a little smarter. Allen should have at least been there at the end, so that he would've died seeing the face of a friend at his side, not those god damn, ravenous monsters. [Oneshot spin-off of another fic] [Character death] [Major angst]


**A/N:** In case you don't know, "Immunity" is the title of an RP-converted-Fanfiction I have up that myself and the user bookmans-lavi on Tumblr are working on. This is a meme drabble I did that's a prompted "what if" spin-off of that. The meme prompt was: _"It's nearing another year since the loss of your character, send me your character's name and how long they've been gone to see how my character responds."_ and this was what I wrote for it. I got carried away with it though(I love my angst) and decided to post it here cuz... I really like how it turned out XD

You don't have to have read Immunity to read this, just know that it's a crossover with The Last of Us so it's not _entirely _canon.

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**Immunity: Anniversary of Lavi  
A D Gray-Man and Last of Us crossover one-shot**

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It was all so fast. All it had taken was a solitary second.

But that was _always_ all that it took, wasn't it? One second where they were a little less vigilant. A little too overwhelmed. A little more desperate than would allow them to even _think _without getting sloppy but couldn't survive the moment without thinking.

_It was all so _**_wrong._**

They were supposed to have found some place _safe_. A last known beacon of hope for humanity where they could hole up and find out how to make a cure from his immunity. To be rid of this damn Infection that had ruined the lives of absolutely everyone.

Instead, what they'd walked into was an infestation. A place equivalent to wolves among sheep, pens scattered with blood and body parts and other unnamed things haphazardly flung _everywhere_, not for the necessity of death to preserve life but simply for the point of mindless, apathetic slaughter.

And like dumb, fucking clueless sheep, they'd walked right into the middle of the blood bath and the literal jaws of the predator in place of what _should_ have been a safe haven.

Behind the walls and doors of only temporary, cornered safety of a just-locked room, they'd realized, and by then it was too late to do anything about it.

The only thing left was to make sure that he and his immunity made it, and Lavi had been willing to throw down everything for that, but not Allen. He knew he would have done the same if roles were reversed. At one point he almost had, but Lavi had anchored him from that so that they had both _lived_ to learn he might be able to save more than just the handful closest to him.

Lavi had known better than to hope for a miracle. That, somehow, they might _both_ be immune. Allen had known better, too, but he wouldn't relinquish that last, futile hope that he was clinging to, the same way he refused to let go of Lavi's arm.

He had groveled and demanded; whined and tantrumed; begged and pleaded, begged and pleaded, _**begged **__and _**_pleaded_****.**

_You can't just throw yourself out there to die for me!_

Who would have thought the redhead would actually have the gal to sucker-punch him like that? Dirty tricks and cheating was Allen's way of claiming victory, not Lavi's. He still held the feeling of that punch to his gut vividly, pinned it there in his mind like a badge of shame, not honor, the same way he wore the scar on his eye that his father had given him before he, too, had died years earlier.

And for the **_same fucking reason_**_ all over again_.

Allen should have been the one to strike that blow. _He_ should have been the one to knock the breath out of the other and make him stay by force, but Lavi had beaten him to it. Because Allen wouldn't have stayed, and they both knew it. The stubborn teenager would have jumped head-first into the carnage to the end and died right alongside him if he'd had the chance, cure be damned.

He didn't want to be the cure for mankind if it meant those he loved had to die for him, put his survival above their own when the only thing he lived for was _them_, not himself.

He could still hear his own harrowing, almost animal screams of grief, always echoing through the recesses of his mind or sometimes bringing him out of his own nightmares where he relived the horror of that moment over and over, the same way it had first echoed through those empty, red-painted corridors where he'd found La-… Lav-….L-…

…what was… _**left over**_.

He couldn't even bring the name to mind, not because he had forgotten it, but because putting a name to what had remained of the man after those _things_ had been done with him would break the white-haired male, and unlike when he had first lost Mana and been taken in by Cross, he had no one to pull him back out of the wreckage, and force him to keep going.

What a low, pathetic, disgusting person he was, that he couldn't even honor the redhead with saying his name, even privately in his mind. Keeping Mana always somewhere on his mind had been part of his penance, because he had been too young and fragile and weak to save him, because he had only been a _child_.

He had no such excuses to explain why he couldn't have saved La-… his _friend_, if only he'd tried a little harder; acted a little faster; been a little smarter.

It wasn't _only_ that Lavi had died that shook him so violently, it was _how_. Allen never found out the full details of how Mana had died. In a way, not knowing was probably better. He had no such blessing of ignorance this time. The redhead had not gone down quickly or easily, he'd gone down in pieces and probably kept going and fighting to the last breath, and no one — especially not such a warm, wonderful person like _him_ — should ever have to die as horribly and _**alone**_ as that.

Allen should have at least _been_ there at the end, so that he would've died seeing the face of a _**friend**_ at his side, not those god damn, ravenous **_monsters_**.

Nothing was drawn to the scene by his broken keening. There wasn't even a single Infected left to take out his sorrow and fury on. The older male had made sure of that, taken every damn one of them down with him and cleared the way for when Allen finally caught up and made it into a safe place again, like it _should_ have been when they'd arrived. At least for now, until more people or more Infected eventually wandered in.

The only thing he could do after that to thank the redhead was give him a proper burial, digging deeper than may have been strictly necessary to make sure no animals came scavenging.

He couldn't bring him back, no matter how badly he wanted to, so this was all he could do to repay the man, far less than what the guy ever deserved, before finally trying to find his way to some kind of civilization.

He didn't really want to continue. Were truth be told, he would rather be in that grave himself, if not in the other's place, then alongside him.

But that would be a betrayal. The other had not sacrificed himself so readily just for Allen to get killed, or for him to simply curl up and die. He carried more than his own life on his shoulders. His fate correlated directly with the fate of what was left of the entire human race, so he couldn't simply let himself die off. It wasn't just about him and… the one whose name he couldn't even bring himself to say to himself. It was about everyone else, too; about Lenalee, Kanda, Krory, Komui, Miranda, Timothy, Emilia… and so many others.

And yet, he almost couldn't bring himself to care about that anymore, despite knowing how disgustingly selfish and disloyal it was.

He had never let anyone as close to him as he had let Mana. What most people saw and knew of him was a mask; a contrived persona he put up to protect, both himself and others. Allen had had nothing at all before Mana, and Mana had given him everything he ever had. He had also taken everything away again, with interest. He had never let anyone get close like that again, not because he had chosen to keep everyone out, nor that he'd simply lost the key to all the locks on his heart. Those keys had been broken, not lost, and almost no one else had figured out how to bypass them.

Lenalee had never known how to break past those barriers and would sooner keep trying, but only with the wrong set of keys. Kanda would never bother, not caring to, but at least recognized that they were there. Most others simply didn't care to notice those locks even existed; that there was anything more beneath the mask.

That redhead, though… he'd simply foregone keys and brought his own damn lockpicks, working them open one at a time, and just like Allen had never really chosen to set those locks in the first place, he hadn't chosen for Lavi to get past them and inside. It had simply worked out that way, until he'd become the closest thing Allen had ever had to family since Mana, like an older, goofy, irritating, dependable, loving, obnoxious brother, and now he was left with more locks without keys than ever before and nobody in the world who knew how to bipass them anyway.

He didn't even want to find the others at this point. He didn't want to seek out other people, even if it meant he would never bring them the cure. Even if they could never get so close as that other male had. Not if it meant more people would die needlessly for _him_.

He didn't want to, but he tried. Tried and failed. Tried and circled back, tried and circled back, circled back, circled back, again and again.

He was lost without Lavi, in a way that went deeper than just being directionally challenged. He could always find his way somewhere if he simply kept trying long enough, and he never ended up back in the same place just because he had a hard time finding his way, but no matter how far he walked, always going a different way, past different places and obstacles, he always came to stop at the same place.

That single grave.

He never failed to find it, and yet he had never been able to find anything else like that his entire life before, and it wasn't particularly easy to find either.

The only sound this time was the occasional chirping of a bird, and the quiet sound of footsteps on frosted earth, winter reluctant to release its grip so spring could fully arrive. The cold outside was nothing at all compared to the ice inside, encasing the locks and fortifications on his soul to be even harder to penetrate, and impossible to pick open.

_**Never again.**_

Timcanpy, his still-loyal little bird, the only thing in life he still let inside, seemed to know this was a private moment, and flew off somewhere out of sight. Allen sighed and crouched down in front of the grave, balancing on the balls of his feet, rather than sitting.

_"Don't sit down, you'll get frost-bite on your ass if you do that, Beansprout! And you don't want to have to thaw it back out!_"

Allen smiled softly at his own imaginings. Softly, fondly, and sadly. Even in death, that damn rabbit could make him smile. Not his clown's smile, but his real one. Genuine and pained.

"So I guess this makes the seventh time, huh?" he mused aloud, laughing faintly. "Sometimes I wonder if you're really the one finding me, not the other way around. After all, I couldn't find my way out of a wet paper bag with an armada of scissors."

Silence.

Tears welled in his eyes, wishing he could get an answer. That he could hear that agitating, teasing, inviting voice again. For fuck's sake, he wouldn't care at this point if he rose from the grave half-decayed, just so long as he was still-… still-…

_Lavi_.

Something shattered. Something he'd desperately been trying to hold together for the last year, knowing that it had been crumbling a little more every time he found his way back, and had been helpless to do anything about other than watch it disintigrate a bit more every time from an already-unstable foundation.

What cracks had been left by Mana, that had slowly started to come together, that Lavi and others had started to fill just a little, were canyons now. Not empty, but filled with glaciers that stressed them wider and deeper, scarring and fracturing even the most solid of stone.

He was almost suffocating. Sobbing hysterically. Shaking. Wretching. Tears turned into frozen streambeds on his cheeks, then wider rivers, but he didn't feel them. He didn't notice the skin on his knuckles split from hitting the ground with them so many times, losing count before even the first punch hit earth. He didn't register his own snarls of profanity and curses at the cruelty of the world and a God he didn't even believe in until long after his throat was raw and his head was hammering from the stress.

A hoard of Infected could have shown up just then, drawn by his shouting and crying, and he probably wouldn't have noticed nor cared. He might have even welcomed it. But nothing did. He was alone, completely and utterly, and the only person that could occupy that emptiness was **_gone_**.

He grieved until he simply didn't have the capacity or energy to continue, and simply stared blankly on his knees as darkness started to descend, taking even the sight of Lavi's grave away from him into obscurity.

Only when Timcanpy returned to his shoulder and snuggled against his nape for warmth did he so much as flinch, stroking the golden cockatiel with one hand, though his affection was somewhat half-hearted. How long before this unforgiving, sick world would claim his precious little bird too? It had already taken just about everything else he had for it to steal away.

He sighed aloud, his breath momentarily visible.

Crying had done him no good. The tears had only frozen to make the ice on the locks thicker.

"You always told me I was like a light in the darkness… like a fire that never died out," he spoke hollowly, not moving despite that he was already too cold to feel anything. Perhaps the late-winter frost had nothing to do with that at all. "…but I don't know how you expected me to keep shining when you were always the candle that held me up."


End file.
